About the only bits that make for semi-coherent reading are cribbed from this piece, which in turn bases it’s entire case on some Cherry Picked examples and a single study which in turn, if you actually read it, is a work that uses modeling (the irony), basing it’s work on three studies from the rather narrow sub-sub-sub-discipline of Genetic Associations.

I guess the blog “M&M” got named for consisting largely of a soft, brown substance coated with a colourful, nutritionless veneer? I leave it to the reader to draw their own conclusions from the fact that Dr Curry seems to think the M&M piece is worth reading.

So in summary, if we flip those around (ie M&M is the anti-Greenfyre), then what Dr Curry is really saying is that she is characterizing Greenfyre’s as:

having coherent, logical arguments

being evidence and fact based

claims made are substantiated with credible sources

is accurate, relevant and rational

I don’t know what to say. Thank you Dr Curry, thank you, but really, there are so many out there who are just as, if not much more deserving. Many, many good people who write coherent, fact based blogs, and who richly deserve the high compliment that being casually dismissed by you truly is. I wear it as an expletive of honour.

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17 Responses

I must admit that I have not read much by Dr Curry, but I have encountered many comments by bloggers who I have come to trust: Rabett Run; RealClimate; InItForTheGold; Deltoid; etc. And the more I hear about Dr Curry, the more it seems IMHO that she seems to be a poor source of information. Either through incompetence or apparently deliberately? spreading false information, IIRC, she is an apologist for McImbecile and can therefore be considered a friend of the agents of darkness and an enemy of truth and science.

Since there’s so much crap on the .net, I just don’t bother to read it, and I consider Curry=crap.

Any criticism emanating from Curry would seem to be high praise indeed.

livinginabox, if you need more info on Curry you would do a whole lot worse than follow the excellent research posted here, but before she formed her blog there was a storm, promoted by KeithKloor (getting clicks), about her refusal to answer straightforward scientific questions on RealClimate, with patience of a high degree demonstrated by Gavin Schmidt, who was demonized for his pains. I forget exactly when but the details above should find it via collide-a-scape. Kloor isn’t exactly a bad guy, just a member of the promoting the conflict gets audience and can’t quite live with reality reportage unit that occasionally includes Revkin and is often mildly misdirected by Pielke.

I have read a few things from Curry, and remember reading an interaction in realclimate. My initial take is that in theory she has some very good points, but that she ignores the full history of the development of ACC and the dynamics of the interaction with deniers. There are certainly things in climategate that are in my opinion both unprofessional and unnecessarily antagonistic, some of which lead to questions of scientific integrity. However compared to how science in general operates and the abuses by specific scientists or competing philosophies in other areas, I find it much less of a problem than she portrays it.
I have similar thoughts about Pilke Jr. who comes at it from an ideologically leftist perspective of the corruption of an establishment bent of the elite manipulating policy for their own purposes.
What Curry is clearly missing is the viscousness and totally unprincipled attacks on climate science by ideologues driven by paranoid fantasies of a political conspiracy. The attack on scientists is in my view unprecedented in modern history outside the communist block. Taking the historical factors into account, the response by climate scientists while not perfect by any means, is much more reasonable than anyone has a right to expect.
I also think that there may be an issue of ego in her standing up to the establishment regarding climate science. this has made her a hero among deniers, and possibly contributed to her comments that are supportive of deniers. I find it interesting how she makes contentions that appear reasonable on RC but is quite happy with totally irrational comments on her blog. She certainly does not contradict the extremely irrational comments there

I meant to say that I frequent Steve goddard’s site quite a bit and there are a number of highly intelligent commenters on his site that do provide interesting information. I have learned quite a bit there and there is certainly some information that is not consistent with ACC theory as it is at least presented by the media or some activists, that is presented.
Of course any attempt to countner some of the absurd claims on the site is met with instant attack by a number of regulars, sometimes with vaguely valid points, but since I refrain from questioning things where I don’t a least know enough to see the ridiculousness often the arguments are absurd. I am quite fascinated with how extremely intelligent people can hold positions that are totally inconsistent with logic when it serves their ideological purpose.
A dew genuine reasonable people who believe in ACC join the fray but they do not have the patience to follow up completely and these commenters are dogged. they often feel they win arguments because the person they are attacking gives up when he sees there is no possibility of logical dialogue. I however rarely give up, and since I don;t care if I am wrong and am not interested in changing anyones mind there, I severely frustrate some of them, most especially Steve. While I Do enjoy that, i am really interested in the relevant information they do have, and I occasionally get very interesting perspectives.

I don’t mean to give the impression that I BELIEVE what they say. In fact they attack me constantly for relying on appeals to authority and not thinking for myself, and then get furious at me for not just believing whatever pops out of their heads.
But I have been pointed to peer reviewed articles that raise questions about some issues that are just accepted as true in discussions I see on sites like this.
For example the amount of CO2 released from tectonic activity in the oceans. I had the impression that this was a fairly understood number, but there does appear to be much more uncertainty among experts about this than is presented in pro ACC sites. now that in no way invalidates ACC, but I DO want to know the reality and change my understanding based on the best current knowledge. This issue has become so politicized that it is hard to keep ideological attachments from affecting ones views

As I said, the best way to learn about such issues is to directly ask the people who actually study this stuff. Ask the papers’ authors themselves how exactly their findings impact the overall picture on anthropogenic global warming (if at all), or put your questions to RealClimate, or use the services of the Climate Science Rapid Response Team.

You won’t expect to learn quantum physics from some random bloke on the street, so why would you expect to learn climate science from some random bloke on the Internet?

Tony, that’s a great example of what goes on at those sites. Broadening the point, it’s very true that we don’t know with much precision the size of many of the natural sources and sinks, some of which are much larger than the fairly trivial (over the short term) volcanic source. Even estimates of anthropogenic sources aren’t all that accurate. But of course people making arguments against AGW based on this miss the big picture, intentionally so.

The key point is that the natural sources and sinks have remained pretty closely in balance over the course of the Holocene, which we know from the ice cores and the fact that climate has been pretty stable. Only recently has the level of CO2 started to go up, consistent with anthropogenic activities (fossil fuel burning and land use changes, the former confirmed by isotopic analysis of the carbon). So, we’re responsible for the increase in the atmosphere, and the amount of that increase is something we know with great precision.

Getting back to volcanoes, bear in mind also that their CO2 contribution is basically a fuinction of plate tectonics, the pace of which does not change on the time scales we’re concerned with (fortunately). One other detail is that CO2 released at depth all stays in the oceans, and if the amount were varying significantly we’d know that too (via changes in the pH).

Of course Skeptical Science covers all of this in depth, so you can save yourself a lot of work just by linking and quoting from there.

this is so weird. I have been so involved at Steve’s blog that I had almost forgotten what reasonable dialogue is like. Though I have been making progress with a few of the regulars who seem to appreciate somewhat that I don’t attack people.

I do frequent Skeptical Science, RD, and other sites like Tamino and Eli Rabbit. I am familiar with the majority of arguments on both sides, and I have an undergraduate background in physics, so while I don’t follow most of the math, I have a deep understanding of the concepts. My major advantage is that I am very conversant in the psychology of self deception and as I said before I am unconcerned about admitting i am wrong when I am shown to be.
I don’t quote from any ACC advocate sites, as they are considered, by definition, corrupt, I do read publicly available peer reviewed papers, and often find contradictions to the “facts” cited from them by deniers.
Still I would like to really catalogue the arguments that are more sophisticated than what is generally dealt with on SkS or that are newer info.
For example Steve has been posting that the amount of multi year ice has been increasing yearly since 2007. whereas other sites say that both volume and extent have been decreasing for decades. often I run into facts that are not necessarily mutually exclusive but using one fact points one direction and another points another. Being as deniers almost never make predictions and are happy to use mutually exclusive arguments, it is not easy to pin them down. I find it fascinating that both ACC supporters and Deniers point to the 98 ENSO as support for their views. I run into a lot of those things. Some are logically easy to filter out the truth, but some are much much harder, at least for me.
that said what I should do is make a folder for posts that may have some credibility and then track down the experts or bring it to sites like this.

Re the multi-year ice, Goddard is (of course) just making it up. At some point you just have to recognize that you’re dealing with a serial fabulist. The people there who complain when you link to SkS or similar *aren’t your audience* since you’ll never convince them anyway — it’s the lurkers you should be aiming at. SkS generally does point to the peer-reviewed research, so by all means link and quote those too, but the plain-language SkS explanations are hard to beat.

Re the unconvincability of Goddard et al., this may be illuminating. The epistemic closure is thorough.

Steve Goddard is indeed a fabulist as quoted above. On your specific point on Co2 from tectonics, that may be interesting, but it’s certainly irrelevant. A casual look at historical CO2 show the massive increase associated with industrialisation. http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm-human-and.html. Any appeal to tectonics for this would have to explain why it suddenly increased.

Judith Curry seems to simply adore the limelight and adulation from her credulous followers. Her blog is very consistent in

1) Deliberately acting provocatively towards mainstream scientists (“High Priests” anyone?)
2) Allowing the most egregious antiscientific nonsense to pass unchallenged in the comments
3) Her stroking of the egos of the antiscience brigade, WUWT for instance.

I originally thought it was a genuine attempt to start a dialogue, but it’s clear now it’s purely about her ego.

Yep. Ego plus strong ideological filter. She pulls out whatever she can, no matter the quality of the information or thinking, to argue against action on emissions reductions/regulation for the United States.

Her narrow, protectionist climate policy stance is about as elitist and jingoistic as it gets.

She seems deeply unable to connect to the idea that the U.S. is not the rest of the world. While domestic adaptation is her primary policy advocacy, even her view of this within her own country is very, very limited: she is about as unable to engage with ‘public concerns’ beyond hurricane policy for the rich on the coastlines, as an American elite with a specialization in hurrican policy can possibly be.

Nontheless, she sells herself as a ‘common sense’ scientist, with the goal of ‘demystifying science’.

Lalalalalalala…

Her self-presentation is that of long-suffering sciencey public servant. It must be how she manages to still get big NSF grants despite such skewed ‘outreach’ and demonstrated absence of any current or significant contributions to science.

Dr. Inaccuracy would be a good postmodern comic book heroine. One day she looks up from her latest revision of her latest paper that she’s one of 10 authors on – or is poring over her latest lit search – and something snaps. It’s all too much.

Yes, yes, I remember the time… when it was all very inspiring and enlightening… You think learning is a really big thing…and you become this big fucking intellectual… and sit around trying to out-intellectual… all the other big fucking intellectuals .. You spend years and years… with your nose buried in these goddamn tomes.. while the world is passing you by.

– Fritz The Cat

Suddenly, none of it matters. NONE OF IT MATTERS! Ah-hahahahahaahahahahahahahaha!

And then the next time she runs into someone who actually cares about all this stuff to the last decimal point, it’s still too much. At least Roger and Keith understand – really get it – that it’s just a game. It’s not about actual clouds and energy and so on, it’s about how you play the game. Why is this hard?

And so, late one night she steps into a phone booth – okay, it’s a lab storeroom – and out emerges DR. INACCURACY!

Scourge of the sure. Foe of the strident fact-Nazis. A fighter for that rarest of things in so-called scientific controversies – nuance. Someone who understands the inherently social and political – in the best possible sense – nature of physical science.

Of course, Dr. Inaccuracy saves the day and wins the key to the city, but mild-mannered Judith Curry must still go through the motions with her Peter Parker day job as a tenured professor and researcher. But only at night does she LIVE!